Compound V3

Our assessment

Compound v3 shares the highest score in this comparison. It holds $1.15bn across nine chains with two audits and reports linked, and its defining feature is a deliberate simplification: each market has exactly one borrowable asset.

Simplification as a security decision

In a multi-asset pool, every collateral type is a potential source of bad debt for every lender. Compound v3 lets you supply various collateral but borrow only the market's single base asset, which drastically reduces the interactions that have to be reasoned about. Fewer moving parts means fewer ways to fail — a rarer design instinct in DeFi than it should be.

Learning from its own history

Compound wrote much of the original playbook for DeFi lending and has had its own incidents, including a distribution bug that released a large amount of tokens in error. v3 is visibly the work of a team that has seen how complex lending systems break and chose to remove complexity rather than add safeguards to it.

What you give up

Borrowers cannot borrow arbitrary assets from a single position, which means multiple positions across markets and more capital tied up in collateral. Capital efficiency is genuinely lower than at Aave or Morpho, and that is the price of the risk isolation.

Who it suits

Compound fits lenders who prioritise a simple, well-understood risk surface and borrowers who want a single stable base asset. Users needing flexible multi-asset borrowing should use Aave.